Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Last year, when Tiger Mom Amy Chua dared to admit that she
had taught her daughters the value of hard work and perseverance, the outcry
was immediate and anguished.

The enemies of the Protestant, or Confucian, work ethic came
out in force to denounce her as an abusive mother.

So-called experts, armed with documentary films helped
disseminate a new concept. America’s children were overworked and underplayed…
or something like that.

If American children are chronic underachievers, if they are
underperforming compared to their peers in other countries, if they do not know
enough math and science to compete for high tech jobs, the reason must be that
they did not know how to have fun.

That is what was passing for enlightened opinion for the opponents of the work ethic.

But the problem was not just limited to the American way of
parenting. The educational establishment has been hard at work inculcating the
value of sloth.

Since everyone now believes that American schoolchildren are
being tortured by homework, everyone has been surprised to discover that the
children themselves believe that their schools are not working them hard
enough.

Teachers have managed to dumb down the educational
experience to the point where children are not being
challenged. Who knew?

You
might think that the nation’s teenagers are drowning in schoolwork. Images of
sullen students buried in textbooks often grace the covers of popular parenting
magazines, while well-heeled suburban teenagers often complain they have to
work the hours of a corporate lawyer in order to finish their school projects
and homework assignments. But when we recently examined a federal survey of
students in elementary and high schools around the country, we found the
opposite: Many students are not being challenged in school.

Consider,
for instance, that 37 percent of fourth-graders say that their math work is too
easy. More than a third of high-school seniors report that they hardly ever
write about what they read in class. In a competitive global economy where the
mastery of science is increasingly crucial, 72 percent of eighth-grade science
students say they aren’t being taught engineering and technology, according to
our analysis of a federal database.

The report does not explain how this happened, but
it is not all that mysterious. For some time now schools have not been in the
education business. They have been in the therapy business.

They are more concerned about a child’s self-esteem than
about whether he learns anything.

They imagine that when some children perform at a very
high level it can only make the underachievers feel badly about themselves.

It never seems to have crossed their rather limited minds
that excellence and success are good things, worth emulating. They seem to
believe that one child’s success can only have occurred at another child’s
expense. Thus, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, they dumb down the curriculum in a vain effort to make other children feel better.

It’s the academic version of income redistribution: you dumb
down the best students in the hopes that their exceptional talents will be redistributed
to those less well endowed.

Thereby the brightest students are being punished while the
lesser students receive grades that they did not earn.

This is a specific manifestation of a general dream for instant gratification which has been promoted in this nation. It is not limited to education by any means. It also includes physical (e.g. abortion, contraception), material (e.g. redistributive or retributive change), and ego (e.g. self-esteem) gratification, with a dissociated perception of consequences.

Ironically, CAP is a causal part of the problem. I wonder if they recognize their role in the creation of a dysfunctional society.

Progressive corruption is not limited to America. It can be observed throughout most first-world nations. It is approaching a conclusion in Europe. This same mentality is being promoted with "good intentions" throughout the rest of the world in different measures and degrees.

Did you ever wonder if this general scenario has not played out before. That may be what we attribute to aliens might have been us a various times throughout history.A significant number constantly grows until they have enough knowledge to become dangerous to the survival of the species. The enlightened ones fail to have enough children to replace themselves and also kill large numbers of what would have been the generations of the future.There is also a large number of people who don't progress as much and they procreate in significant numbers. Their education is "dumbed down" so that they can be easily controlled by the enlightened ones. The enlightened ones become more and more dysfunctional even while they treat everyone else as not worthy of existence. They are, so to speck, slaves for the Liberal Plantation forced by a government of enlightened ones to do their bidding.Unfortunately there comes a time when an charismatic leader unites them agains't there betters and the resulting war annialates almost every one, especially the enlightened ones It would seem that the enlightened ones were not so enlightened.Wen are now back to square one with little to do but survive. Those who remember put severe strictures on those they feel are responsible.Sorry, I am just having one of those days where one notices how foolish we seem to have become.